OK, I was short-circuiting too much there, I had just re-run the command from
bash with the same args I saw from "ps -efa" but that didn't set the path properly.
if I change into /usr/lib64/beagle and do "mono Start.exe"
or run it as "/usr/bin/beagle-search"
it just hangs the same as it does when started from Gnome :-(